This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed last ruler of the Sikh Empire, arrived in England in 1854, five years after the British annexation of the Punjab had ended his rule and the empire his father Ranjit Singh had built and held together for four decades. He is described as the first permanent Sikh in Britain, a single deposed monarch settling in the very country that had just taken his kingdom, rather than the start of any organised religious community arriving by choice.
His mother, Empress Jind Kaur, joined him in London in 1860, reuniting a family the annexation and its aftermath had separated for years. What had begun as one exiled ruler's arrival grew only slowly into something more: it took the presence of his mother, six years later, before the small circle of Sikhs in Britain amounted to more than Duleep Singh living there alone.
What this changed for Sikhism's spread was the planting of the first permanent Sikh presence in Britain, a presence that began with a defeated monarch's exile rather than any deliberate missionary effort or planned settlement. Over the following century that beginning became the seed of a Sikh community in Britain that today numbers close to half a million, the largest Sikh population found anywhere outside India itself, traced back to one exiled family's arrival in London.